I have a lot of friends of mine who are working in e-learning domain as LMS Admins and Flash Developers and everyone out there seems to be a bit worried about Yahoo toolbar getting installed along with the Flash Player. The main reason being, most of the clients who have a need for e-learning have some sorts of restriction wherein they don't allow their employees to use Yahoo or other instant messaging clients within the office. Most of them seem to be surprised by a new Yahoo toolbar install option on the Player download page and they have requested for an alternative for this, something sorts of a page where one has the option only to install Flash Player. Since most of them have opened their firewall only to this page where they can only download the Flash Player and can install a Active X from there, they consider this more like a possible security breach and a threat to their intranet policy.
I asked most of them to refer their client to the Flash Player FAQ page which gives details as to what it is and is not about. But it seems some are still not convinced and are asking for alternatives for the same.
I personally don't like to comment about the decision of Macromedia by itself as I see it from two different perspective. Thinking of it from Macromedia perspective its a revenue model and a way of supporting a profitable and loyal client like Yahoo, I personally feel there isn't really anything wrong in it. On the other side, seeing it from a user perspective though it doesn't affect most of the independent developers and application developers directly, it does have some level of impact on the service oriented industries like the e-learning industry which have strict client's (mostly from the financial sector) who don't want their users to give a means by which they can download something which they are not supposed to be downloading or installing. Though a possible workaround is to store the Active X installer somewhere locally in an intranet website and ask the users to download it from there and install, there is lot of cost and effort involved in it which is about changing the existing re-directions pages to a new page for all the archived courses and the old ones. A considerable amount of effort need to spend in modifying those pages to a new one.
March 08, 2005
More 3D Support for Flash
Electric Rain today announced the release of its products Swift 3D MAX AND Swift 3D LW 3.0 adding new Flash rendering abilities to 3DS MAX, Autodesk Viz and Lightwave 3D. Adding to the big performance enhancement which 8Ball claims to give, these tools will be of a great use in bringing 3D into Flash. Read the full press release here.